TPSM-12: 80/20 Point

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We all spend time looking for that tasty milestone where we’ve done
twenty percent of the work and are enjoying eighty percent of the benefit.
Some technologies have this 80/20 feel, some don’t, and around this subject
swirl some of our
most vituperative debates. The 80/20 Tribe’s
offerings are denounced as “Just a toy!”, while they hurl back accusations of
pedantry, big-system disease, and so on.
Should we be listening with special care to the arguments of one side or
another as we try to predict technology futures?

The Table ·
In this table scores of ten go to technologies like HTTP, a protocol
without state or session that allows querying and updating resources and
that’s all. A zero would be something like Xanadu, Ted Nelson’s
no-holds-barred attempt to solve all the problems of hypertext in one fell
swoop.

Winners

score

Losers

score

SQL/RDBMS

8

OODBMS

3

Unix/C

8

4GL

2

Open Source

8

AI

2

PC Client

10

VRML

0

WWW

10

iTV

2

Java

7

Ada

0

XML

8

SGML

0

Discussion ·
I’ll start this essay with a nod to the famous letter-writer’s
apology for a long letter, because he hadn’t the time to write a
short one. Minimalism is hard; I’m not going to examine the reasons
here, but the mental machinery involved in the design process naturally tends
towards more rather than less.

Thus, there are almost no perfect Tens here.
The standards and software around SQL/RDBMS spilled over the edges of
the relational theory messily in several directions.
Unix/C came with RATFOR, and a “General-Purpose Macro
Processor” that was part of the problem not the solution, and so on.
Java came with the execrable AWT 1.0, which was in practice considerably
worse than having no UI toolkit whatsoever.
And XML brought along NOTATION and unparsed entities and some other
baggage that has effectively never been used but it’s probably now to late to
leave behind.

The high scores given to both SQL/RDBMS and Java apply to
the seminal early releases, not the messy sprawling edifices that these have
grown into.
It may be hard to believe, but when the early SQL evangelists hit the market
lots of sectors dismissed them, with arguments along the lines of “Well that
impoverished rows-and-columns vision of reality may be adequate for your
needs, but my data is much richer than that!”

I don’t think the perfect scores given the WWW and the PC
Client should be controversial.
The Web contains almost nothing that is new or hadn’t been thought of before;
it was distinguished by what it left out, perhaps most crucially the notion
that links couldn’t be allowed to break.
And as for the original “IBM PC,” it’s really hard to believe that it could
have had one iota less functionality and ever gotten to first base.
The processor was a joke, the I/O architecture a bad dream, and the OS was
DOS.

I’ve given Open Source the average of all the other scores in its column,
because it tends to just copy what works with little prejudice towards either
minimalism or completism.

Conclusion ·
This one is a slam-dunk.
Technologies that hit the 80/20 point win, and those that don’t lose, and
that’s all there is to it; it’s hard to think of significant positive or
negative failures.
Whenever I’m backed into a corner and am forced to prognosticate, this is the
first thing I turn to; and it works.